


Look Back

by MixolydianGrey



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 14:36:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17045522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MixolydianGrey/pseuds/MixolydianGrey





	Look Back

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thebandsvisit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebandsvisit/gifts).



They say looking back is dangerous. 

Orpheus is singing a love song, an old standard, but after the first verse it is clear that he is in love, and by the middle of the second it’s clear who he is in love with. It’s all there, the song and the things behind the song, in his eyes. He looks at Eurydice and Eurydice looks back, and that’s it. Boom.

He sings to her, and his love shines in the making of the song. But the song is all that he makes. He won’t buy the wedding bands; he says the rivers will bring them. He won’t lay the wedding table; the trees will take care of that. He won’t make the wedding bed; that one’s on the birds, who are expected to fly to Orpheus and lay their feathers at his feet. 

No word from the song about what the newly naked birds are to do. Orpheus doesn’t do details. The birds would give up their feathers, and that was that. How they handle their newly destitute status is beyond the scope of his poetry.

Sometimes nothing comes of the songs people sing, thinks Eurydice. Or not enough, anyway. Orpheus loves her. He truly does. He just isn’t very good at it.

No, that’s not fair. Building up anger might stoke the engine to carry her forward, but she isn’t angry. She is exhausted. She can’t face more songs without substance. She can’t stay and starve, waste away for waiting.

When she looks around, she sees what the blissful haze of dream and song has obscured. She sees how times are: hard, and getting harder all the time. She sees how empty her larder is; the growls of her belly echo in the emptiness. And she sees Hades and what he offers.

People follow Hades. A million feet fall in line. A million hands reach for mortar and brick and stone. Hades gives them something. A wall to work upon. An enemy to defeat. He offers them something they need.

He offers what Eurydice needs. Food. Shelter. If it comes at the price of being ornamental — so what? She could stay topside and be a muse, and starve, and wait for a poet’s song to come true, or she could go way down to Hadestown. Dress in clothes so fine, sip ambrosia wine. He is a mighty king; everybody says so. He must be making some mighty big deals. He comes along and offers to make a deal with her, wants her to fly down to feed at his hand. To come be his songbird down in the mine. 

If there’s a bird in a mine it’s generally a canary. Do canaries sing? Do canaries pause every now and then and try to remember what flowers smelled like and how sunlight felt as it lay across them like a benediction and a promise?

And what if she is keeping Orpheus from doing more, learning more, being more? From choosing? He calls her his muse. What if she were his anodyne, his anaesthetic? His anchor? With his muse at hand, he wouldn’t stir himself to act. Maybe she has to go not just to save herself, but to save him as well.

She hears Hades’ call. She sees what he offers. It catches her eye, and she looks back. Hades makes her fear those around her and their desperation. Then he promises to protect her from them.

The choice is yours if you’re willing to choose, he says. But choices generally aren’t all laid out before you make them. There’s always more to it, and you only learn about those parts after you choose.

Though she’s already made the deal, Eurydice rehearses arguments in her head as she packs. It’s my gut I can’t ignore, she thinks. Orpheus, I'm hungry. You can have your principles when you’ve got a bellyful. The flesh will have its way. Nobody’s righteous. Nobody’s proud. Nobody’s innocent. Not when the chips are down.

She looks out the window into the fields. She would recognize Orpheus from any distance. There: the tilt of his head. He’s composing a song. The song is about how much he loves her. 

He doesn’t see her. She finishes packing, and goes. 

In between sets in the mine one day, she thinks she hears him calling. His voice is thin and distant. Wait for me, it says. Wait for me. But Eurydice was done waiting a while back. The trees hadn’t laid the wedding table, and bark makes a thin soup.

She wishes it had turned out some other way. But if Orpheus had stopped singing, had dressed up in his Sunday best and gone out to pound the pavement for a job, that would pluck the heart right out of his chest. His songs are his gift and his power. He would cease to be Orpheus if he stopped singing. Surely Eurydice could not have wanted that. That’s the way the river runs. It is not logical to want to apologize for not destroying him.

But logic looks different in Hadestown. This is the town that builds a wall to keep itself free. Still, nothing comes of wishing on stars, or the songs people sing — or their apologies, however sorry they are.

It isn’t that Eurydice had wanted to leave Orpheus. She just wanted to leave the pain gnawing in her guts, the hunger. She wanted not to feel a thing. She didn’t really want to die per se. Just fall asleep. Close her eyes and disappear. Into something other than a dream, please. Orpheus’ dreams are songs, and he walks in them and doesn’t see the poverty around them through the song-haze, not while he is eating song-apples and picking up song-gold from the rivers paying tribute to his art. The song-apples were lovely but they wouldn’t keep her alive. His songs are dreams and she can’t live in them.

Dreams are sweet until they’re not. Men are kind until they aren’t. Not just the ones who threaten you, brutalize you. But also the ones who sing to you and expect you to wait forever, supping on air and moonbeams. 

When Orpheus finds out what she’s done, he intends to follow her, although he’s been warned. They’ll suck his breath. They’ll take his song. No song that does not belong to Hades can survive for long in Hadestown. It’s a matter of border security. Hades won’t let his kingdom fall for a song.

Hades doesn’t deal in songs, though he might keep an ornamental songbird. Hades sells fear. Fear and strength, or at least control and someone to give orders so all you have to do is follow. It’s a beautifully simple transaction.

His wife Persephone sells pleasure, the kind that medicates. An anodyne. A little something from the good old days. Even if you don’t quite remember the good old days, and now you only have the songs about them. Your memories may be clouded. Blinded by the sadness of it all. Persephone can fix you up on the down low. What the boss don’t know, the boss won’t mind.

Love remembered can burn like hunger used to, and Eurydice can’t help looking for a way to see Orpheus. She offers to pay Persephone’s fee, but Persephone just takes Eurydice to the crack in the wall, shows her how to flip the lenses in the apparatus pressed close to the cleft, how to focus in on a familiar figure in distant fields. Then she watches Eurydice watching Orpheus, with a strange ghost of a smile on her lips.

The next time, she lets Eurydice look as long as she likes for free, as long as she can watch.

Hades got her for bed and board, like all his children. But now they clamor for freedom. So would Eurydice if she had the energy. She doesn’t. All she has the energy to do is sing softly as she peers through the crack. Come find me, if you ever walk this way.

Come find me, lying in the bed I made.

And Orpheus does come to find her. Surely now he is doing something that makes a difference. He is coming from there to here to win her and bring her home again.

She looks at him. He looks back. She was not certain he would be able to forgive her for leaving, but all the love is still in his voice and in his eyes. As are all the dreams. She fears slipping back into them as much as she hopes they will be strong enough to triumph over Hades’ will.

Persephone and Hades have a very complicated relationship. There’s no explaining exactly how everything happens, but the song works, Orpheus sings her free, and up they go toward the exit, him leading with a song, her following him. She’s followed him before, in his hopes and in his songs about what was going to happen. Maybe they really will happen, this time. 

But what is he doing? He’s shivering. Faltering.

She sings encouragement to him. The coldest hour of the coldest year, she sings, comes right before the spring. Hold on. Hold on tight.

But doubt creeps in. Doubt creeps in and fills up the space where there should be Eurydice and the space where there usually is a song. Is she still there? She had left him once before. He stops singing and he turns. 

He turns, and it seems to her that he turns so slowly, yet there is not time for her to yell. To say no, what are you doing, no. Keep singing. Keep singing and believe in me. Or believe in yourself. Believe in your song, that’s the strongest thing you have. I’m sorry I doubted your songs before. Keep singing. 

Please. We’re almost there. The dawn must be soon, for this is surely the darkest hour. 

He turns and he looks at her, and they both know. When she turns to go down again to Hadestown she does not look back.

Later, with Persephone, she sits. Do you want to try the crack again? asks Persephone. Try looking for him? 

No, says Eurydice. Pour the wine. Spill a drop for Orpheus. Wherever he is wandering alone upon the earth, let all our singing follow him and bring him comfort. His songs are about as useful as a flower, so I raise my cup to him.

Persephone’s smile is edged with pain. Nobody’s righteous. Nobody’s proud. Nobody’s innocent. Sing for everyone who has the hard choices. 

The choice is yours if you’re willing to choose, says Eurydice, remembering. 

It always is, Persephone says.

So we raise our cup to Orpheus. To Orpheus, and all of us. We’re all on our way, if it’s true what they say. And as each day dies, after we look back on what we’ve done, we go to bed in the dark, trusting — or sometimes too exhausted to trust, sometimes with just the tiniest flicker of hope or shred of a dream — that the sun will go on rising like Persephone says. That the earth will come back to life. That we can try again on the morning of whatever new day we are mercifully given.

Goodnight, brothers, goodnight.


End file.
